


As Winds That Blow Against a Star

by Mithen



Category: Emily of New Moon - L. M. Montgomery
Genre: F/M, Post-Book(s), Second Chances, Travel, World War I, Writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-18
Updated: 2011-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-27 12:00:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/295629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithen/pseuds/Mithen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Dean Priest runs into widowed novelist Emily Kent in post-war Paris, he finds himself drawn irresistibly back into his Star's orbit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As Winds That Blow Against a Star

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Syksy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syksy/gifts).



__  
The darts of toil and sorrow, sent  
Against your peaceful beauty, are  
As foolish and as impotent  
As winds that blow against a star.  
\--Joyce Kilmer  
  


He was in Kyoto when he heard it--Kyoto, where the autumn leaves fell in serene silence, far from the bloody convulsions wracking a generation in Europe. Dean Priest woke in the deep of night at the sound of an anguished cry that seemed to rip through his quiet room, shattering the silence with pain beyond bearing.

He staggered to his feet, blind with terror, the echoes of that wild call tearing at his soul. "Emily," he cried hoarsely, reaching out in the darkness, "Emily, where are you?" Lurching forward in the night, he stumbled into one of the delicate paper screens in his room, smashing it and bringing his hosts running to gape at the sight of the ungainly foreigner standing in the ruins of beauty with tears running down his face, hands outstretched as though to comfort a phantom.

Weeks later, he saw with no real surprise the headline: _Canadian Artist Killed in Europe._ Phrases leaped out at him: "Promising young artist," "one of the final offensives of the war," "wounds sustained while saving a comrade," "survived by his wife." There was a picture, drawn just a few months ago, an angel bending over the battlefields of Europe--with _her_ eyes, of course, gazing with compassionate sadness on the soldiers below.

Dean did not fly to her side. After all, that grief-stricken cry in the night had not been meant for him. He had only--overheard it, from afar.

*** * ***

He wrote her, of course--a little letter to say he was thinking of her. Her reply caught up with him in Stockholm, a creamy envelope with his name on it in her delicate, looping hand. He held it for a long moment, then opened it, his hands on the paper as gentle as if caressing someone's cheek.

It was a quiet letter, thanking him for his condolences and asking after his travels. There was a sombreness in it that spoke of long dark nights and gray mornings. At the end she wrote:

"I must tell you--and I hope it will not grieve you too greatly--that I have sold the Disappointed House. I am living at New Moon again, and it saddened me to think of it standing alone and empty once more. I sold it to the son of Owen Ford--he's the writer who spends summers up at Four Winds, perhaps you've heard of him--and his new bride. They are very young and very happy, and I believe they will love the Disappointed House as it deserves. It is not disappointed anymore, though, Dean--it never can be again. Teddy and I filled every corner of it with love and joy in our golden space together, and it holds that happiness in its very planks and boards now.

We lived life together to its fullest, Teddy and I--drained the cup of bliss to the last drop. And now I shall drink the lees as well, with no regrets."

Dean touched her signature, feeling his own regrets rustling around him like paper falling into ash.

*** * ***

Years and continents passed by, each city giving way to another as Dean Priest roamed the earth, a rootless modern cosmopolite. He was at home everywhere: Siam and San Francisco, Australia and Abyssinia, Formosa and Finland. That being at home everywhere meant nowhere was home was not something he had time to wax philosophical over. There was only one place in the world he did not go, one island where his wandering feet never took him, as if a flaming sword barred the way.

He was in Paris, at a corner cafe with his coffee and brioche, when she alighted from a bus nearly in front of him. For a moment he wondered if he had gone mad, staring at the sight of Emily in a bottle-green dress--not one of those hideous flapper dresses, but still a modern cut, with a dropped waist and a hem that brushed her calves--and a cap with small white flowers around the band, standing graceful and slender on the Paris cobblestones. The only thing that convinced him he wasn't imagining it were the faint strands of silver running through her hair and the fainter lines at the corners of her eyes.

He was still staring when she turned and saw him, and her face lit with the slow and beautiful smile he saw in his dreams. "Dean," she cried, hurrying across the sidewalk to clasp his hands in hers, affectionate and true as if they hadn't been nearly strangers for almost a decade. "Is it really you? How wonderful! I didn't know you were in Paris! It's me--Emily," she added, worry touching her smile, and he realized he hadn't said anything, was just looking at her in wonder.

"Of course, my dear, of course," he said hastily, drawing her down to the chair next to him. "Forgive me, it was just so--sudden to see you. In that green dress, with the flowers in your hair--I thought for a moment Daphne had escaped her laurel and come to visit the City of Lights."

She laughed, coloring slightly. "You always paid the prettiest compliments."

"Whatever are you doing in Paris, Emily?"

"It's for my book--my publisher insisted I should come to Europe for a little bit." The dimple next to her mouth deepened a trifle as she glanced at the table near his elbow, at the dove-colored little book with the title in ghostly white letters: _These Pale Cold Days_. "You're reading it?"

He was re-reading it, actually, but said merely, "Of course. Have you come to convince the European elites that 'Emily Kent'--" He managed to say the name without stumbling, "--isn't a 'man hiding behind a female moniker'?"

Mischief danced in her purplish-gray eyes. "You read that review? Such rubbish!"

"Some people can't credit that a woman could have such--insight into the horrors of war." Dean said. He himself would likely have doubted it of any other woman, but not of Emily.

She shook her head impatiently, tugging off her gloves as the waiter put a cup of _cafe au lait_ in front of her. "I spent a lot of time with boys coming home from the battlefields, some of them badly shell-shocked. I saw how they struggled to deal with a normal life again, how hard it was for them."

"It's the war scenes, though--the descriptions of the battlefields. Not just the factual detail, but the tone--the despair, the terror and boredom mixed together."

"I listened to their stories, that's all." But Emily's eyes were far away, and Dean wondered--not for the first time--what visions and nightmares might have come from the bond she always claimed to share with her love.

"Anyway, it's a powerful book," he said, hoping to turn her eyes back to him from their misty distance. "I remember I told you _The Moral of the Rose_ had the 'glowing spirit of youth'--Well, _These Pale Cold Days_ has the clear and level eyes of an adult, one who looks at the world and sees it as it is, and yet still dares to hope."

She didn't color at this compliment, but smiled slightly. "Thank you, Dean," she murmured. Dean remembered how when she was a girl she would go into raptures if he condescended to praise her writing--but those days were long gone, consumed by flame. He hoped she could at least tell it was sincere praise, although somehow he didn't want her to know that he had read it in one sitting, stopping only at four in the morning to find dawn a gray smudge on the horizon and his eyes full of tears.

They talked for a while longer--about Paris, about New Moon, about art and music--until suddenly Emily reached over and grasped his hands again. "Dean, dear," she said, "Would you do me the favor of kidnapping me?" He gaped at her and she laughed wryly. "You see, I'm supposed to go to Gertrude Stein's _salon_ this evening and--oh dear, how I've been dreading it." She dropped his hands with a rueful look. "I've been there a couple of times before, and I always end up feeling--oh, I don't know! Dowdy, and fusty, and so dreadfully _conventional._ That was the word that horrible Fitzgerald woman used to describe me, with my long skirts and unbobbed hair--'so quaintly conventional,' she said, and everyone laughed, and I wanted to claw her eyes out. But I just drew myself up and gave her my best Murray look and announced frostily that _some_ conventions were worth following. But I confess I was rather flattened by it," she added with a sigh. "Because I _did_ want them to approve of me--I mean Stein, and Pound, and that startling Djuna Barnes." She picked up her cup and gazed into it. "It seems so-- _unfair,_ somehow. To be seen as so eccentric and flighty at home, and then so stodgy and sentimental here."

"They sound like a lot of spoiled children who wouldn't know a good story if they sat on it," Dean said viciously, mentally crossing the entire Lost Generation off his reading list.

"Oh no," protested Emily, "You mustn't think that. They're brilliant, truly, and some of the work they're doing is breathtaking. The problem is that I'm supposed to go there again tonight, and I've been dreading it all day. Another evening of watching Scott and Ernest fence at each other with words--it's too exhausting. If I can tell them that I ran into an old friend of mine and can't come--well, it would be such a relief! And we do need to catch up, don't we?" she added, smiling at him. "Oh, _do_ tell me you're not busy tonight!"

"Emily, if you need kidnapping, I am just the man to do it." He executed an awkward bow in his seat. "And who better to show you Paris than a hunchback, after all?"

Her gray-purple eyes flashed angrily. "Dean Priest, do not start--"

"--Forgive me, fair lady," Dean said, standing up and offering her his arm. "I swear I'll behave from now on." Indeed, he wasn't sure what contrary impulse had prompted him to say it--except maybe that he loved how she looked when she was angry.

Emily hooked her arm in his. "Then lead on, old friend."

*** * ***

Paris was never more beautiful than the three days he spent there with Emily. It was a perfect early summer, sunny but still cool, and the streets seemed full of music and beauty. On the third day, after a surfeit of statues and cathedrals, Dean said, "What else strikes your fancy to see?"

She had been looking out over the city, gemmed with colored light in the dusk. Now she turned her head to look at him gravely, her eyes dark and unsure. "There is...one place," she faltered.

"Of course, my dear," he said, and let her smile warm him.

*** * ***

They drove in silence, Dean's little canary-yellow Citroen humming on the road winding through the fields north and west, toward the border. The cemetery was in a poppy-filled field off the road, silken red petals blowing and bowing before the tall, slender woman in her black dress. Dean watched her pacing along the rows of identical white gravestones, her eyes searching. When she stopped and sank to her knees in front of one of them, he looked away and read the inscription on the large, square marble memorial-- _The Canadian corps on 27th Sep. 1918 forced the Canal du Nord and captured this hill_ \--read it over and over, hating Lieutenant Frederick Kent for being forever young and brave and perfect, and for leaving Emily alone.

"It's a beautiful place," a voice said at his elbow. He looked up at Emily--her eyes dry, her smile warm and peaceful. "I'm glad to know where he's resting." She touched his elbow, the lightest of touches. "Thank you, Dean."

She wasn't like some war widows he had seen, he thought as they walked back to the car, whose loss became something they clung to, obsessed over, something they let define them. She carried it with her always, yes, but like an unseen crown atop that dark head, whose weight only increased her grace.

Remote and beautiful, untouchable. Dean had grabbed at a star once and been left with only dust in his hands. He was content, now, to watch her shine.

*** * ***

"--Even Aunt Elizabeth says that I should stay for a while longer, if that's what I want." Emily's dusky eyes scanned the letter as if looking for hidden messages in the old-fashioned handwriting. "With the tour over and all the speaking engagements done, I could go back to Italy and spend the rest of the summer there, finish a few stories and send them off--" She smiled at the letter, a little wistfully. "You know I love New Moon, Dean, but it can be so hard to get writing done there, sometimes. A month in Italy, in the sun--it would be like a dream."

She was wearing a plum-colored dress today that brought out the dreamy purple of her eyes. Dean felt that familiar thrill of delight go through him when he looked at her, poised and graceful--even the threads of silver in her dark hair were like shooting stars glimpsed within a curtain of night. "Then you should do it," he said prosaically, helping himself to more butter on his croissant.

She rested her chin in her hand, looking at him. "Come with me."

"Emily!" He nearly laughed. "The Murrays of New Moon would never hear of such a thing."

"Oh, fiddle!" she said. "Perhaps you didn't notice, but I am a grown woman and able to make my own decisions. Besides," she went on before he could defend himself, "I'm already considered temperamental and shocking at home. And after a week being the provincial cousin of the avant-garde of Paris I really do feel the need to do something _unconventional._ Come, Dean," she pleaded. "We'll rent rooms across the street from each other and I'll work all morning and then you'll come and whisk me away to lunch in some sun-drenched piazza and we'll spend the rest of the day rambling around and laughing and talking like old times."

The image was entrancing, irresistible. But he chuckled, hearing a bitter edge to it. "How often I dreamed of showing you Rome! But you've been there already, you've seen it all." For a moment he remembered his old dreams--how he was going to lead his shy young bride here, show her the wider world, how she would gaze at him with adoration and worship.

The woman in front of him smiled and took his hands, meeting his eyes directly and affectionately. "But never with you, Dean."

*** * ***

Dean had seen Rome many times, but somehow with Emily at his side the city was transfigured, he saw it with new eyes. It was as she had said: each day at lunch time he would climb the winding steps to her rooms, sometimes carrying an armful of flowers from the stall in the street. From the second flight he would hear her typewriter clattering, the tiny silver bell punctuating each line, the _zing_ of the carriage being pushed back into place. Or sometimes there would be silence, and he would come in to find her working on a letter with her favorite fountain pen--letters to New Moon, or to Miss Royal in New York, or another writer named Virginia in England. She would put down her pen or turn from her typewriter with a smile and go out with him into the sun-drenched streets to explore. They argued about art--Emily adored Raphael and bristled at Dean's dismissal of him as facile--and drank coffee and watched the people pass by Dean's veranda in the cooling dusk, making up stories about them and their lives. Dean had been in Rome before but this summer the flowers were brighter, the vendors friendlier, the air itself sweeter.

When August came and the city seemed to be simmering in light, they decamped for Florence and a villa in the Tuscan hills, Emily's battered typewriter case balanced on top of their luggage. There were long wandering walks and longer wandering discussions, broken off to admire a hawk circling slowly in the air or a shy rabbit with velvet ears giving them a dubious look.

Then one morning they took a walk in unseasonably cool weather, a gentle fog wrapping the hills in silver. In a field of purple flowers, Emily stopped to look around with wonder at the shining pearly light.

"It's like we're the only people in the whole world," she breathed, her eyes aglow. Then something seemed to kindle in her face and her gaze went far away, beyond Dean, beyond the flowers and the mist. _"Oh,_ " she gasped as though she'd been struck. "Oh, I must get back and--" She was already moving away from him, hurrying down the slope heedless of the dew-drenched flowers turning the gray hem of her skirt to black. "I have to write this down, Dean," she said breathlessly when Dean caught up with her for a moment. "I've just thought of the most _perfect_ \--I'm sorry, I must get back to my typewriter!" She waded through the grasses without seeing the flowers, without even noticing that Dean couldn't keep up with her.

Dean was left alone in the flower-strewn field, once again watching Emily recede away from him into a world he had no part in.

*** * ***

The old Priest jealousy reared its vicious head, and Dean spent a few days sulking angrily. He had hoped that her need to write had become small and manageable, something that could be contained in a morning's work and then put aside, and was bitterly angry to find himself shut out once again. It was Dean's dark night of the soul, and in that darkness he wrestled with his angel and finally cast it down--or at least came to accept that Emily was Emily, whether laughing with him or seeing visions beyond his ken with her dreamy eyes. Walking back from a long, twilight amble, he looked up at the light in her window far above him and--finally, truly--let go of his need to have her wholly. Without her writing she would not truly be Emily, after all.

Not that Emily noticed--she was caught up in her story, in her characters, as entranced as a Delphic oracle. She would have forgotten to eat some days if Dean had not brought her bread and fruit.

When her typewriter fell silent and she paced the floors angrily, complaining that she didn't know how to continue, didn't know where the plot would go next, Dean suggested a change of scenery. So they were off to Greece and Santorini, its azure-blue domes gleaming against whitewashed walls. The tiny, unconquered, petty part of Dean hoped that perhaps she would put her novel aside, but instead the change did seem to inspire her once more. Her typewriter echoed morning and night, the little silver bell doling out progress reports to Dean as he read the newspapers and ate fresh artichokes with olive oil.

A few weeks later, a bewildered and sleepy Dean opened his apartment door and blinked as Emily threw her arms around his neck. "It's done," she cried. "I typed the last word just moments ago and I simply had to tell you. Oh, let's go out. Is there somewhere to dance here? I need to dance."

Dean squinted at the clock. It was after midnight. "There's a place just around the corner," he said, and she smiled at him and hugged him again.

She insisted on having a glass of the local white wine, strong and citrus-scented, and they danced to phonographs of "When My Baby Smiles at Me" and "I'll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time." Emily's color was high, her eyes dark and bright, and when they left to walk along the beach she kept dancing, they were dancing together, the damp sand making their steps uncertain and tentative, her body brushing his to the rhythm of some music only she could hear.

She rested her head on his shoulder for a moment. "Thank you," she said, "For being so patient with me while I was writing."

"I haven't been very patient," he admitted, laughing. "I sulked quite a bit at first."

She laughed as well. His arms were around her as if they were dancing, but they weren't moving. He hoped she couldn't feel his heart hammering as foolishly as if he were a young man rather than old and lame. "I might not have shown it very well, but I was--glad to have you nearby," she said, brushing a lock of hair from his brow with a cool white hand. Her fingers slipped down his cheek, stopped at the curve of his jaw; she gazed at him as through waiting for something.

After a moment she sighed and pulled away to take his hand in hers and stroll down the beach, swinging their hands between them. "You must show me Greece," she said, "Now that I'm able to see it again." Her smile at him was mischievous, but there was a sadness lurking under it, somehow.

She sent her manuscript off to the publisher's the next day, a fat envelope bristling with Greek stamps.

Dean did not ask to read it, and she did not offer to let him.

*** * ***

A glorious week followed, a week of luminous sapphire-blue: the sea, the sky, the brilliant buildings. Emily was there again, and Dean reveled in her presence. They ate pomegranates and olives and drank hot sweet coffee and talked nonsense about mythology and philosophy.

At the end of the week he came whistling into her rooms to find her sitting with a letter in her hands. She raised her eyes to his, and they were bright with unshed tears.

"Oh Dean," she said. "It's...it's Aunt Elizabeth. She's--"

"You must return, of course," he said. "Let me call and find you a flight."

She sniffed once, hard. "It's time I returned anyway, I suppose," she said. "I'm in terrible danger of forgetting that I'm a respectable and conventional Murray, cavorting about in such heathenish lands." Her voice had an echo of Aunt Ruth, but her smile was sad. "But it's true that New Moon is the heart of my life, whatever lovely labyrinths I may wander in," she added. "I must always return to where my roots are, where my _soul_ is. Dean," she said softly, "Won't you come back with me? It's been ever so long since you came home."

"Home? Dear Emily, Blair Water has never been my home. The world is my home, and I fly where I will."

"Then fly back with me," Emily coaxed.

But Dean shook his head. "The northern climes are not for me right now, I fear. I'll follow the sun, and--and maybe we'll meet up again by chance again someday."

"Not by chance," said Emily softly. "I'll come to you again, Dean, wherever you may be."

Dean went walking on the beach after seeing her off at the airport, but the air seemed less sweet, the sunlight dimmer. The charm had gone out of Santorini, somehow.

He sighed, then went indoors to pack. Perhaps Bombay next, or Fiji.

As always, the thing he put away last was the small silver box filled with withered aster petals, their purple faded but still true.

*** * ***

It was nearly a year later when he came back to his apartment from walking the streets of San Francisco to find her sitting in his drawing room as if it were a perfectly normal place to be. "Emily, what--how did you--"

He broke off as she sprang up to clasp his hands. "When I got your latest postcard and knew you were on the same continent as me, I simply had to come. I've missed you so, Dean," she said, and the simplicity of the sentence made his throat close up. "Cousin Jimmy and Aunt Laura said they could get by without me for a time, and I needed to see you."

Dean made himself busy making tea, keeping his hands moving to cover the rush of emotions tumbling through him. "I read _Wreaths of Amethyst_ ," he said as he put the teacup in front of her--Assam with extra sugar and no cream, the way she liked it.

"What did you think of it?" Her eyes had gone dark gray the way they did when she was in the grip of some strong emotion, and the teacup trembled very slightly in her gloved hand.

"To be honest, I had expected something different," he said candidly. "Because you wrote it in Europe, I was surprised the setting was Prince Edward Island. But," he added as she looked like she was about to speak, "I could still see the influence of Italy in your writing. It was--freer, somehow. With hidden depths like the lambent heart of an opal."

He didn't admit that he had picked up the book hoping--and fearing--that there would be a character based on him as Orson in _These Pale Cold Days_ had clearly been based on her husband. But he had seen no sign of himself or of Emily in the book, which was a witty and bittersweet romance, with just enough hope at the end to keep it satisfying.

Emily's face was grave and intent. She waited for him to continue.

"I think the best thing about it was the relationship between Sidney and Claire," he said. He chuckled ruefully, remembering it. "Now _that_ is a talent."

"What is?"

"Well, I knew I should probably dislike both of them. They're selfish and thoughtlessly cruel, and they hurt each other so thoroughly that I felt like I _shouldn't_ want them to end up together."

"But you did?" Emily's voice was low.

Dean threw his hands in the air. "They were so _interesting_. Maybe Sidney deserved someone less demanding, maybe Claire needed someone less aloof, but somehow when they were together...the dialogue lived and breathed, it sparkled, and I wanted them to make it work. I still can't quite credit you made it plausible," he laughed, "But you did. It's a miracle, and you deserve all those glowing reviews I've read."

"I'm glad you liked it." Emily took a sip of her tea. Her hand was quite steady now, and a hint of a smile touched her lips. "You especially. It is your book, really."

"Mine?" He shook his head, bemused. "But...I'm not in the book at all. There's no one like me in it, everyone is young and beautiful and--" He broke off, appalled at the desolation in his own voice, but Emily was putting her teacup down and reaching out to take his hands in hers.

"Dean...my Dean," she whispered. "Come home with me." And she leaned forward then and put her lips to his.

Her kiss was like her smile: sweet and tentative at first, then deepening into something that hinted at depths of passion and endless wells of joy. He was gasping when she pulled away, with shock and disbelief and a strange hope that pounded almost painfully at his ribs. "Emily," he breathed.

Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes dark and her lips reddened. "You haven't called me your Star in so long," she murmured. "Call me your Star again, Dean."

She wasn't his, he knew that, she had never been his. She would never be anyone's but her precious cherished own. But when Emily commanded, Dean Priest was helpless to resist.

"My Star," he whispered, "My beautiful Star of the Morning."

And when Emily Byrd Starr Kent came into his arms and kissed him again, Dean knew that he would follow her at last back to New Moon, would follow her anywhere she went.

For in the end, home for Dean was wherever his Star shone the brightest.

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: _These Pale Cold Days_ is from [ a poem](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176852) by WWI poet Isaac Rosenberg. _Wreaths of Amethyst_ is from the poem [White Fog](http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/steasdale/bl-steasdale-whitefog.htm) by Sara Teasdale, who has always struck me as the most Emily-esque of poets.


End file.
